PageRank Algorithm

Years and Authors of Summarized Original Work

• 1998; Brin, Page

Problem Definition

Given a user query, current web search services retrieve all web pages that contain the query terms resulting in a huge number of web pages for the majority of searches. Thus it is crucial to reorder or rankthe resulting documents with the goal of placing the most relevant documents first. Frequently, ranking uses two types of information: (1) query-specific information and (2) query-independent information. The query-specific part tries to measure how relevant the document is to the query. Since it depends to a large part on the content of the page, it is mostly under the control of the page’s author. The query-independent information tries to estimate the quality of the page in general. To achieve an objective measure of page quality, it is important that the query-independent information incorporates a measure that is not controlled by the author. Thus the problem is to find a measure of page quality...